PTC and Unity Partner to Accelerate Augmented Reality Development

1 November 2016 – PTC and Unity Technologies today announced a collaboration to simplify augmented reality (AR) development. PTC and Unity will work together to integrate PTC’s Vuforia AR platform with Unity in order to deliver a seamless development experience to Unity’s global ecosystem.

The Vuforia AR platform uses advanced computer vision technology to enable digital content to be placed in real-world environments. With support for handheld and head-worn devices, Vuforia includes easy-to-use workflows, SDKs, and cloud services for Unity.

Vuforia has been adopted by more than 275,000 developers, and powers the majority of AR applications in the Apple App Store and on Google Play.

“AR is amazing to experience, but tricky to develop. Your canvas is no longer a rectangular screen – it’s the physical world. We’re excited to partner with Unity to make that canvas much easier to work with,” said Jay Wright, president, Vuforia, PTC (above).

Unity is the leading global development platform for creating 2D, 3D, VR, and AR games and experiences. Unity is used for more 3D experiences than any other 3D game and experience development software. There were more than 5 billion downloads of Made with Unity mobile games in Q3 2016 alone.

Today, developers use Unity and Vuforia together to create most of the game, enterprise, and consumer 3D applications available, including titles from Activision, EA, LEGO, and Square Enix. In fact, of the more than 30,000 published Vuforia apps, more than 80% have been made with Unity.

“The Vuforia team has done a tremendous job of establishing Vuforia as the de-facto AR platform for Unity developers. We look forward to working with them more closely on our shared mission to bring more creators to AR and accelerate development,” said Elliot Solomon, vice president, business development, Unity Technologies (left).

Tighter integration of Vuforia and Unity is expected to create a streamlined developer experience to allow new AR developers to become proficient more quickly and existing developers to be more productive. Additionally, improvements to AR application performance are expected through planned optimizations to camera and rendering pipelines.